Brotherhood Beat-Down: Coalition Led by Pro-Western Official Claims Lead in Libya

Any bad news for the MB-lead Islamist bloc is good news for us. The one potential downside is, if everything holds as currently reported, there’s a possibility explode-everyone Jihad will be the next mechanism by which some of the Sharia-freaks try to take control.

(NY Times) -A coalition led by a Western-educated political scientist appeared on Sunday to be beating its Islamist rivals in Libya’s first election of the post-Qaddafi era, breaking an Islamist wave that swept across neighboring Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings.

The preliminary results, characterized by independent monitors and party representatives who witnessed the vote count for a new national assembly, reflect in part the well-known name and tribal connections of the coalition’s founder, Mahmoud Jibril. He is the former interim prime minister who helped lead the de facto rebel government in Benghazi, and he is also a member of Libya’s most populous tribe, the Warfalla.

The apparent success of Mr. Jibril’s party over the Muslim Brotherhood’s bloc now makes Mr. Jibril perhaps the most important voice in the next stage of Libya’s political transition, though he is barred for now from elected office.

In a campaign that took place over just two weeks, after a 40-year stretch in which the country’s dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, crushed any dissent and dismantled political structures, the ideological lines for Libyan voters remained fuzzy, at best.

Many voters acknowledged plans to let tribal, family or community ties guide their vote. The Islamists also sought to portray Mr. Jibril’s coalition as “liberal” or “secular” — and some who stood with him acknowledged privately that for them those terms were perfectly apt. Part of the coalition’s success may have been because of lasting suspicion of Islamist groups instilled during Colonel Qaddafi’s rule.

Still, Mr. Jibril rejected the terms. He and his allies publicly echoed a frequent refrain of Libyan voters who were unsure what to make of re-emergent groups like the Muslim Brotherhood: “Do they think they are more Muslim than we are?”

A political scientist who earned his doctoral degree at the University of Pittsburgh and taught there as well, Mr. Jibril said in a recent interview on Libyan television that friends and neighbors anywhere he has lived would describe him as someone who “goes to the mosque for Friday prayers, and we see that he prays.”

“The Libyan people don’t need either liberalism or secularism, or pretenses in the name of Islam, because Islam, this great religion, cannot be used for political purposes,” he said. “Islam is much bigger than that.” continue reading